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The Department of English comprises one of the larger humanities departments in the bi-college community of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, with 60 majors (29 seniors and 31 juniors) in the current academic year 2007-2008. The department offers a vigorous and diverse curriculum, and supports several special programs, including a Creative Writing concentration and important interdisciplinary studies, such as Africana Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature. The faculty is drawn from a number of distinguished schools of graduate study, among them Yale, Berkeley, Duke, Brown, Syracuse University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington. This faculty seeks to maintain a working balance between an enduring commitment to the traditional canon of English and American literature and an expanding horizon of fresh concerns, including courses in African-American literature, Asian-American literature, Native American literature, Irish Literature, Contemporary Women Writers, and courses inflected by particular theoretical foci, such as performance theory, queer theory, postmodernism, and post-colonialism. As a group, the faculty works together to encourage both devoted teaching and productive scholarship. Detailed information about faculty publications and teaching and research interests is available by following the link, Faculty, here and as listed above.
Located in Woodside Cottage, one of the college buildings associated with the original farms that formed the basis of the college's campus in the early nineteenth century, the Department of English is fortunate to have so relatively pastoral and quiet a setting of its own, even as it is in easy walking distance from the new Campus Center. Woodside also contains one of the college's more interesting classrooms, the Meditation Room, a large, open classroom/library, that was added to the original farmhouse before the turn of the century. Many classes are held in Woodside Cottage, not only in the Meditation Room, but also in the professors' offices, where the small writing tutorials meet. These tutorials, of four to five students, are a characteristic part of the study of English at Haverford. Other faculty of the department have their offices in nearby Hall Building.
